Harper’s cabinet mulls massive Chinese resource project in Arctic – by Bob Weber (The Canadian Press/Globe and Mail – December 28, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Another massive Chinese-owned resource project is before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet.

Some time in the new year, four federal ministers are to decide how to conduct an environmental review for the Izok Corridor proposal. It could bring many billions of dollars into the Arctic but would also see development of open-pit mines, roads, ports and other facilities in the centre of calving grounds for the fragile Bathurst caribou herd.

“This is going to be the biggest issue,” said Sally Fox, a spokeswoman for proponent MMG Ltd., a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned China Minmetals Corp., formerly called Minmetals Resources Ltd.

It would be hard to exaggerate the proposal’s scope. Centred at Izok Lake, about 260 kilometres southeast of Kugluktuk, the project would stretch throughout a vast swath of western Nunavut. Izok Lake would have five underground and open-pit mines producing lead, zinc and copper. Another site at High Lake, 300 kilometres to the northeast, would have another three mines.

MMG also wants a processing plant that could handle 6,000 tonnes of ore a day, tank farms for 35 million litres of diesel, two permanent camps totalling 1,000 beds, airstrips and a 350-kilometre all-weather road with 70 bridges that would stretch from Izok Lake to Grays Bay on the central Arctic coast.

Read more

Ring of Fire: Can struggling First Nations benefit from mineral bonanza? – by Heather Scoffield (iPolitics – December 26, 2012)

http://www.ipolitics.ca/

FORT HOPE FIRST NATION, Ont. — Roland Okeese is watching with keen interest as mining companies from around the world stake claims in the area around his remote northern Ontario reserve.

The 36-year-old father of six and grandfather of two is in his prime — strong, healthy and hopeful for a new career supporting the mining activity in the Ring of Fire. For Okeese and so many other community members, however, the path from here to there is difficult.

Okeese knows the wild country well. He’s good with a power saw. He has a few months’ experience doing contract work for Noront Resources. But for much of his adult life, he was wrestling with an addiction to the prescription painkiller OxyContin. He didn’t graduate from high school. And his formal training is minimal.

“I’d like for the (mining) to happen. I’d choose to be working,” he said defiantly, recognizing that some in his community don’t share his view. “But I don’t have the skills.” It’s a problem that needs to be resolved soon if a local workforce is to benefit fully from the mining activity poised to take off in the Ring of Fire.

Indeed, there is a newly formed consensus among federal and provincial officials, native communities and major companies that aggressive training programs need to be set in place now.

Read more